Waves lapped against the volcanic rock of Norfolk Island, a sound Rory knew better than his own heartbeat. But tonight, the rhythm felt off. Instead of the familiar, soothing crash and retreat, it was sluggish, thick, like the water struggled to move.
He stood on the clifftop near Kingston, looking out over the dark expanse of the South Pacific. The moon, nearly full, cast a weak, diffused light through a thin veil of high clouds, making the sea's surface look greasy, unwell.
Rory pulled his jacket tighter. Nineteen years he'd lived here, born and bred on this isolated speck of green. The ocean was his backyard, his pantry, his playground. He knew its moods, its dangers, its gifts. This, however, this feeling scraping at the back of his mind, was alien.
He'd first noticed it a week prior. The fishing had been poor, not just for him but for everyone. Nets came up strangely clean, or worse, tangled with unrecognizable, gelatinous masses that dissolved into foul slime on deck.
The usual seabirds seemed hesitant, circling high overhead but rarely diving.
Down at the pier earlier, old Mr. Henderson, his face a roadmap of sun and sea salt, had spat onto the weathered planks. "Water's crook, boy," he'd grumbled, not meeting Rory's eyes. "Feels wrong."
That was the word. Wrong. It wasn't stormy, wasn't rough in the usual way. It was simply… wrong.
Rory kicked a loose stone, sending it skittering over the edge. It vanished into the darkness below without the expected splash. He waited. Silence. Not even a faint plink.
He strained his ears, leaning forward slightly. Only the thick, slow drag of the waves answered, a sound like wet cloth being pulled over stone.
He turned back towards the scattered lights of Burnt Pine. Maybe he was just spooked. Lack of sleep, maybe. His mum had been on his case about staying out too late. Still, the unease clung to him.
Walking home along the winding road, the Norfolk pines stood like silent sentinels against the pale sky. Their usual whispering rustle was absent. Even the wind felt muted, stagnant. It was as if the island itself was holding its breath, waiting.
He passed Emily Bay, its normally inviting crescent of sand looking stark and desolate under the moonlight. The lagoon water, usually clear and turquoise even in memory, looked inky, opaque. He shuddered, quickening his pace.
Inside his small house, the familiar scent of woodsmoke and baked bread did little to dispel the chill that had settled deep in his bones. His mother, Kaye, was reading by the fire, a worn paperback in her hands.
She looked up as he entered, her brow furrowed slightly. "You're late, Ror," she said, her voice gentle but tinged with worry. "Everything alright? You look pale."
He forced a smile. "Yeah, Mum. Just… thinking." He hesitated. "Have you noticed anything strange? With the water?"
Kaye closed her book, placing it on the small table beside her armchair. "Henderson was talking down at the store. Said the fishing's off. Happens sometimes, love. Tides change, currents shift."
"It feels different this time," Rory insisted, shedding his jacket. "It's quiet out there. Too quiet. And the water… it moves weird."
She studied him for a moment. "You spend too much time staring at that ocean. It gets in your head. Have some soup; it's still warm."
He didn't argue, ladling thick pumpkin soup into a bowl. But her dismissal didn't help. He knew what he felt. It wasn't just changing currents. It was fundamental.
The next morning, the wrongness was more pronounced. Sunlight, usually sharp and brilliant, seemed to struggle through the atmosphere, casting a yellowish, sickly light over the island.
Rory went down to Cemetery Bay, intending to check his lobster pots.
The tide was exceptionally low, exposing slick, dark rocks he'd rarely seen uncovered. The water that remained in the rock pools was murky, coated with a thin, iridescent film that shimmered like oil but smelled metallic, acrid. Dead starfish lay limp on the sand, bleached white.
He found his pots wedged awkwardly between rocks, far higher up the beach than the tide should have left them. One was empty, the bait untouched. The other contained something that made his stomach clench.
It looked vaguely like a crayfish, but its shell was soft, almost translucent, and pulsed faintly. Its limbs were too numerous, jointed at unnatural angles. Small, milky eyes on short stalks swiveled blindly.
Rory recoiled, dropping the pot. The creature inside spasmed, letting out a wet, clicking sound. He felt a surge of nausea.
With a piece of driftwood, he managed to tip the pot over, letting the grotesque thing slide out onto the wet sand. It lay there, twitching feebly, before a slow, thick wave washed in – far slower than it should have – and dragged it back into the murky depths.
"What the hell?" he whispered, backing away.
He spent the rest of the day trying to rationalize it. A mutation? Pollution from a passing ship? But no ships had been reported nearby for weeks. And it didn't explain the water's behavior, the silence, the pervasive sense of dread.
He saw Dougie Parsons near the old convict ruins later that afternoon. Dougie was Rory's age, usually full of jokes and easy confidence. Today, his face was drawn.
"Seen anything weird, Rory?" Dougie asked without preamble, kicking at a loose stone in the wall.
"Yeah," Rory admitted. "Down at Cemetery Bay this morning. Something in my pot. Wasn't right." He described the creature.
Dougie nodded slowly. "Dad pulled up a net yesterday. Full of… slime. And something that looked like jellyfish, but grey. Fell apart when he tried to touch 'em."
He lowered his voice. "Heard talk down the pub. A tourist boat went out towards Phillip Island three days back. Hasn't returned. No radio contact."
A cold knot formed in Rory's gut. Phillip Island, the stark, reddish outcrop visible from Norfolk, was notoriously treacherous, but a modern boat with experienced operators vanishing without a trace?
"They sent a plane out?" Rory asked.
"Yeah. Saw nothing. No debris, no oil slick, nothing." Dougie shook his head. "It's the water, man. Something's wrong with the water."
That night, Rory couldn't sleep. He kept seeing the pulsing creature from his pot, hearing the sluggish drag of the waves. He went outside again, drawn back towards the cliffs.
The moon was higher now, the thin clouds gone, but the light it cast on the water was still wrong – flat, metallic, lifeless. The sea didn't sparkle; it seemed to absorb the light, swallowing it whole. The air was still, unnaturally so. No breeze stirred the pines.
He walked along the cliff edge, peering down. Below, the water moved with that same disturbing lethargy. It looked thick, viscous. Where waves broke against the rocks, there was no spray, no foam, just a heavy, wet impact, like mud slapping against stone.
Then he saw it. A pale shape bobbing just beyond the rocks at the base of the cliff. At first, he thought it was debris, a log perhaps. But as it drifted closer, turning slowly in the unnatural calm, the moonlight caught it.
It was a body. Face down, limbs limp. Rory's breath hitched. He scrambled for his phone, fumbling with numb fingers to dial the local police station.
As he spoke, his voice trembling, he kept his eyes fixed on the shape below. It wasn't drifting randomly. It seemed to be moving with a slow, deliberate purpose towards a narrow inlet between the rocks, a place where the water pooled deep and dark even at low tide.
He finished the call, his heart pounding. Help was coming. But the body was almost at the inlet.
And then, something else happened. The water around the body darkened, thickened further. It wasn't just water anymore; it seemed to congeal, rising slightly, adhering to the pale form.
Tendrils of this thicker, darker substance extended from the main body of water, wrapping around the corpse's limbs, its torso. They weren't pulling it; they were absorbing it.
The body seemed to sink into the water, not beneath it. Flesh paled, losing definition, blurring at the edges where it met the dark liquid.
Rory watched, frozen in horror, as the shape dissolved, melting into the black, viscous pool within the inlet. Within moments, it was gone. There was no sign a body had ever been there, only the dark, still water, looking thicker, more substantial than the sea around it.
Headlights approached along the cliff road. The police. Rory tore his eyes away from the inlet, stumbling back towards the road, his mind reeling. What had he just witnessed?
He tried to explain it to Sergeant Davies, a burly man whose skepticism was plain. "A body, Sergeant! It was right there! Then the water… it just… took it."
Davies shone his heavy torch down into the inlet. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating only rock and the still, black water. "See anything now, Rory?"
"No, but it was there! I saw it dissolve!"
"Dissolve?" Davies sounded weary. "Look, son, maybe the tide pulled it back out, or into a crevice we can't see from here."
"No! The water did something! It wasn't normal water!" Rory felt frantic, unheard.
Davies sighed. "Alright. We'll keep an eye out. Maybe something will wash up. You head home. Get some rest." He clearly thought Rory was mistaken, perhaps hysterical.
Rory walked home numbly. Rest was impossible. The image of the body melting into the water replayed endlessly in his mind. The water wasn't just wrong; it was predatory. Alive, in some grotesque way.
Over the next few days, a grim atmosphere settled over the island. Two more fishing boats were reported overdue. Supplies started running low as freight shipments were delayed, the captains spooked by the strange conditions and the disappearances.
People spoke in hushed tones. Tourists cancelled their trips. The beaches lay empty.
The water continued its wrongness. It developed a faint, phosphorescent glow at night, not the usual sparkling bioluminescence, but a sickly, greenish luminescence that pulsed faintly, like a diseased organ.
Strange, new landforms appeared along the coast – spits of black, tar-like sand reaching out into the sea, banks of foul-smelling foam collecting in usually clear bays.
Rory felt trapped. He avoided the coastline as much as possible, but on an island this small, the ocean was inescapable. Its presence felt oppressive, watchful.
He started having nightmares – dreams of drowning not in water, but in thick, clinging ooze, of being pulled down into a dark, silent world where shapes moved just beyond perception.
His mother tried to reassure him, but he could see the fear in her eyes too, especially when news of the second missing boat spread. Even the most hardened islanders were starting to admit that this was beyond any known natural phenomenon.
One evening, desperate for answers, Rory sought out Mr. Henderson again. He found the old man sitting on his porch, staring out towards the darkening sea, a half-empty bottle beside him.
"Mr. Henderson," Rory began hesitantly. "You said the water was crook. What do you think is happening?"
Henderson took a long swallow from the bottle before answering, his voice raspy. "Something's woken up, boy. Or something's come here. Something that don't belong."
"What do you mean?"
"Old stories. Tales my Nanna used to tell. 'Bout times when the sea turned sour. When things came out of it, or things were taken into it. She called it 'the Hungry Deep'." He shuddered, despite the mild evening air.
"Said it changes the water. Makes it… want things."
"Want things?" Rory repeated, the word chilling him.
"Living things," Henderson said grimly. "Sucks the life right out, adds it to itself. Makes itself bigger. Stronger." He gestured vaguely towards the coast. "It starts slow. A bad feeling. Poor fishing. Then… it starts taking."
Rory thought of the dissolving body, the missing boats. "Can we stop it?"
Henderson laughed, a harsh, brittle sound. "Stop the ocean, boy? How? Nah, you just gotta hope it gets full, or bored, and goes quiet again. Or moves on somewhere else." He took another drink. "Just stay away from it. Don't let it touch you."
Stay away from it. On Norfolk Island. Impossible.
A week later, the situation grew critical. The last supply ship turned back halfway from Australia, the captain reporting encountering a 'wall of dead water' unlike anything he'd ever seen. Panic began to set in.
Food rationing started. People were talking about evacuation, but how? No planes were willing to risk landing with the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns near the island, and the sea route was clearly suicidal.
Rory felt the island shrinking, the 'Hungry Deep' closing in. The sickly green glow from the water at night was brighter now, casting an eerie illumination onto the lower slopes of the island.
The sluggish, thick quality of the water had intensified; it barely seemed to move like liquid anymore, more like a vast expanse of sentient gel.
One afternoon, driven by a desperate need to do something, anything, Rory went back to the cliffs near Kingston. He had a coil of rope, a heavy knife, and a vague, half-formed plan to try and get a sample of the 'wrong' water from the inlet where he'd seen the body disappear. Maybe if they understood what it was…
He found a relatively safe spot to anchor the rope and began to lower himself down the rock face. The air grew colder, damper, as he descended, carrying that metallic, acrid smell. The sound of the sea below was a low, wet gurgle, utterly unnatural.
He reached a ledge just above the inlet. The black water within it pulsed faintly with that nauseating green light. It looked thick as pitch.
He braced himself, took out a small, sealed jar from his pocket, and leaned out, intending to scoop some of the substance.
As his hand neared the surface, the blackness seemed to react. It didn't surge or splash. Instead, a tendril, thick as his arm, rose silently, smoothly from the pool. It moved with a horrifying, deliberate slowness, reaching towards him.
Rory jerked back, heart slamming against his ribs. The tendril stopped, hovering in the air for a moment, seeming to sense his fear. Then, slowly, it retracted back into the pool, merging seamlessly with the dark mass.
He clung to the rock face, trembling violently. Getting a sample was madness. This thing was aware. It was waiting.
He started to climb back up, his movements clumsy with haste. He was halfway up when he heard a shout from above.
"Rory! Rory, wait!"
He looked up. It was Dougie, peering down from the cliff edge, his face pale with alarm.
"What are you doing, man? Get out of there! It's getting worse!"
"I know! I saw it move!" Rory yelled back, scrambling faster.
"No, not just that!" Dougie sounded panicked. "Look at the bay!"
Rory risked a glance sideways, towards Emily Bay. What he saw made his blood run cold. The 'water' in the lagoon wasn't just glowing anymore. It was rising.
Not like a tide, but like a single, malevolent entity expanding. It had already covered half the beach, a slowly advancing mass of viscous, glowing blackness. And it was heading inland.
"It's coming ashore!" Dougie screamed. "We have to warn people! Get up here!"
Rory hauled himself the last few feet, Dougie grabbing his arm and pulling him onto the safety of the clifftop. They stared for a moment in shared terror at the encroaching darkness below. The 'Hungry Deep' wasn't content with the coastline anymore. It was coming for the island itself.
"My mum," Rory gasped, thinking of their house, not far from the coast.
"Mine too," Dougie said, his voice tight. "We gotta run."
They turned and sprinted away from the cliffs, towards the interior of the island, towards the higher ground around Mount Pitt. Behind them, they could hear a faint, wet, sucking sound as the black ooze began to climb the lower slopes. There were screams now, distant but drawing nearer.
They ran through the familiar lanes, past shuttered houses and abandoned cars. The sickly green glow reflected off the undersides of the Norfolk pines, transforming the landscape into something alien and terrifying. The air was thick with the metallic stench.
They reached Rory's house. The door was open, swinging slightly. "Mum!" Rory yelled, rushing inside.
The house was empty. A half-eaten meal sat on the table. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. Panic seized him. "Mum! Kaye!"
He ran through the small rooms, Dougie close behind. Nothing. He burst back outside, looking wildly around. The sucking sound was louder now, closer. The green glow illuminated the trees at the bottom of their garden.
"We can't stay here, Rory!" Dougie urged, grabbing his arm. "She might have gone up the mountain already! Come on!"
Rory hesitated, torn between the need to find his mother and the primal urge to flee the advancing horror. He looked towards the encroaching glow, then up towards the dark silhouette of Mount Pitt, where hopefully, safety lay.
But then, a movement near the bottom of the garden caught his eye. A figure, stumbling, lurching out from behind the hibiscus bushes.
"Mum?" he whispered.
The figure turned towards them. It was Kaye. But it wasn't. Her skin was pale, translucent, like the creature in his lobster pot. Her eyes were milky white, unseeing.
Her clothes were saturated with the same black, viscous slime that was consuming the island, and it dripped from her fingertips. She moved with a jerky, unnatural gait, her head lolling slightly.
She raised a hand, not in greeting, but in a slow, grasping motion. A low moan escaped her lips, a sound devoid of humanity, full of the sea's cold, hungry wrongness. The black ooze coating her seemed to pulse faintly with the green light.
Dougie swore, backing away. "Rory, that's not her! It took her! It's wearing her!"
Rory stared, frozen. His mother. Changed. Absorbed. Animated by the 'Hungry Deep'. Tears streamed down his face, hot against his cold skin. He saw the faint outline of her features beneath the glistening slime, a ghost of the woman who had raised him.
The creature that was his mother took another lurching step towards him, its hand outstretched. The sucking sound grew louder as more of the black mass oozed into the garden behind her.
"Rory, run!" Dougie screamed, pulling desperately at his arm.
But Rory couldn't move. He looked into those milky eyes, saw the black slime creeping up her neck, and felt something inside him break. This was the end. The water had taken everything – the island, the life he knew, and now, his mother.
He shook off Dougie's hand. "Go," he choked out. "Get to the mountain. Warn them."
"Rory, no!"
"Go!" He shoved Dougie hard. "Save yourself!"
Dougie hesitated for a fraction of a second, his face a mask of fear and conflict, then turned and ran, disappearing into the eerie, glowing darkness towards the higher ground.
Rory turned back to face the advancing creature. His mother. He couldn't fight her. He couldn't abandon her facsimile. He took a step towards her, then another. The metallic smell was overwhelming now. The wet, sucking sound filled the air.
The creature stopped its advance, tilting its head slightly, as if curious. The black ooze dripped from its chin.
Rory closed the distance between them, tears blurring his vision. He reached out a trembling hand, not to fight, but to touch her face, one last time.
As his fingers brushed the cold, slimy surface that covered her cheek, the creature reacted. Its arms shot out, wrapping around him in a parody of an embrace.
The black, viscous substance surged from its body, covering Rory instantly. It was shockingly cold, thick, cloying. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, silencing his cry.
He felt a terrifying pressure, a sense of dissolution, as if his own body was losing coherence, its boundaries blurring. He felt the cold, alien consciousness of the 'Hungry Deep' pressing in, overwhelming his own thoughts, his memories.
He saw flashes – the dissolving body in the inlet, the mutated crayfish, the vast, pulsing green glow of the corrupted ocean. He felt himself being pulled apart, absorbed, becoming part of the wrongness.
His last coherent thought was not of fear, but of a profound, crushing sorrow. He wasn't just dying; he was being unmade, assimilated into the horror that had swallowed his home. He would become another puppet, another lure, another part of the hungry water.
From the slopes of Mount Pitt, Dougie looked back. He saw the green glow engulf Rory's garden completely.
He saw two figures briefly silhouetted against the light, locked in a grotesque embrace, before they merged into the slowly advancing black tide, becoming indistinguishable from the consuming ooze.
Then, they were gone, leaving only the relentless, silent advance of the Hungry Deep under the sickly, watchful light.
He turned and ran again, the image burned into his mind, the sound of the sucking water chasing him up the mountain. The water was wrong, and it was taking everything.